[HN Gopher] Some neurons are active when adding, others when sub...
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Some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting
Author : gmays
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-02-16 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.uni-bonn.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.uni-bonn.de)
| Taniwha wrote:
| it's not surprising of course - if only because most addition and
| subtraction involves small sets of disjoint memorized number
| facts
| air7 wrote:
| I haven't read the article, but isn't such a statement
| tautologically true? Because neurons exist in all abstraction
| levels of the thought process, if you compare any two distinct
| processes, you're bound to find (by the fact that they are
| distinct) some neurons that fire during one and not the other.
| floxy wrote:
| What about adding a positive number to a negative number?
| lorenzfx wrote:
| The PI was also involved in an earlier study [1, 2], that found
| "Jennifer Aniston neurons", i.e., neurons that get activated when
| the proband gets shown an image of Jennifer Aniston, but not
| activated when shown the image of another celebrity.
|
| It's probably not that surprising, that other cells are active
| during other specific activities and inactive during others.
|
| Anyway, it's fun seeing my old institute featured on hn.
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210637/
| [2] https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037
| %2F0033-295X.117.1.297
| firebaze wrote:
| This is only true for a large subset of people, I'd bet 80:20 on
| :)
| candlemas wrote:
| I want to know what happens when you are asked to pick a random
| number. How does the brain work that out?
| asddubs wrote:
| I read somewhere a long time ago that when asked to pick a
| random number between 1 and 10, people are way more likely to
| pick 7 than anything else
| function_seven wrote:
| I've confirmed this experimentally. (As in, I asked a bunch
| of people to "pick a number from 1 to 10").
|
| But that was a long time ago, and I wonder if the common
| knowledge that '7' is the most popular would sway people to
| avoid it. I know I do. I should re-run this.
|
| In any case, it's clear that 7 is the most random digit,
| right? The other digits are either even or otherwise "nice".
| 7 is chaotic and unpredictable. 7 sells loose cigarettes to
| middle school kids. 7 will leave the shopping cart in the
| middle of the parking lot. Of all the digits in [1-10], it's
| 7 who'll more likely than not be the one who left the
| bathroom stall without flushing.
| irrational wrote:
| It's easy to draw a shape with 3 (triangle), 4 (square), 5
| (pentagon or star shape), 6 (2 overlapping triangles), 8 (2
| overlapping squares), 9 (3 overlapping triangles), and 10
| (2 overlapping pentagons) sides; but a seven sided shape?
| Screw that.
| function_seven wrote:
| You just reminded me of something from when I worked at a
| pizza place. Most of the time we sold pizzas cut the
| normal way. Either 6, 8, or 10 slices using a circular
| cutter. The normal style you might have in your kitchen.
|
| But one Wednesday each month, we had a massive lunch
| order for a local school. Hundreds of individually-boxed
| slices, delivered just before 11:30. The slice box was
| sized for a 1/7 slice of our extra large pizza. We had to
| use a "wagon wheel" type slicer for those. It was a huge
| stainless thing that must've cost a fortune.
|
| I always wondered why it was 7 slices and not 6 or 8. The
| best theory I could come up with was that these slices
| all had to be the exact same size; no variance from
| sloppy cutting. And the only way to ensure that would be
| to specify it as an odd number to make it impractical for
| the normal cutter.
| tobr wrote:
| A pentagon is one of the hardest things to draw well.
| irrational wrote:
| Draw a five pointed triangle (use the golden ratio if you
| can't do it by hand) and then connect the points.
| Pentagon!
| dkersten wrote:
| > five pointed triangle
|
| :-)
| irrational wrote:
| Oh, right. In my mind a 5 pointed star is made up of 5
| triangles, each in a 1.618 ratio, so I mixed up star and
| triangle in my mind.
| derrasterpunkt wrote:
| Your username fits you well, sir.
| noobly wrote:
| I guess there's more to the story of why 6 is afraid of 7..
| sorokod wrote:
| When asked to "pick a number" or "pick a random number" why
| should people avoid the popular 7 or 17 ? What property you
| are expecting them to hit when you ask this question?
|
| Also:
|
| why was six afraid of seven? because seven ate nine
| function_seven wrote:
| Well when someone is asking me for a random digit, the
| last thing I want to be is _predictable_! To avoid the
| shame and embarrassment of being basic, I go with 2. Or
| maybe 9. Depends on my mood.
| sorokod wrote:
| Maybe if you ask for an unpredictable number, you might
| get different answers.
| outworlder wrote:
| That might explain why Data's lockout code in that particular
| TNG episode has so many "7" on it :)
|
| One, seven, three, four, six, seven, three, two, one, four,
| seven, six, Charlie, three, two, seven, eight, nine, seven,
| seven, seven, six, four, three, Tango, seven, three, two,
| Victor, seven, three, one, one, seven, eight, eight, eight,
| seven, three, two, four, seven, six, seven, eight, nine,
| seven, six, four, three, seven, six. Lock.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rERApU26PcA
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I wonder if it's a feeling like this:
|
| You feel like 1 - 5 are very familiar to you. You've known
| those numbers the most out of all of them. So you'd rather
| pick 5-10 which seem more spontaneous and mysterious. Your
| balance mechanism kicks in and you want to choose something
| that is in the middle. You choose seven because 7.5 is the
| actual middle and hey, there's a 7 in that number so let's do
| that.
| 323 wrote:
| It's well established that 17 is the most random number between
| 1 and 20.
|
| https://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=961998
| sorokod wrote:
| Not very well. The brain evolved in environment that encourages
| the assumption that events are dependent. The concept of
| independent events is not natural to us.
| thecoppinger wrote:
| I imagine by finding a number with some sub-conscious relevance
| in that moment, then convincing our conscious self that it's
| random.
| junon wrote:
| I'm literally the furthest thing from a neuro expert but I
| feel like we do this with a lot of things. Over-confidence is
| a pretty on the nose example.
| throwamon wrote:
| This may indirectly answer your question:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP-Ipsat90c
|
| TLDW: We don't pick numbers at random. At all. We're so bad at
| it that you can make money off this fact.
| kensai wrote:
| Fascinating! I wonder if multiplication/division is just a
| combination of these neurons or again some other.
| JackFr wrote:
| It's not.
|
| This is garbage research. Nine participants took part in a
| study where they were prompted to do mental arithmetic adding
| or subtracting numbers between 0-5 while wired up with ultra-
| fine electrodes measuring the how frequently 585 individual
| neurons fired while completeing the task.
|
| I presume at that point the data were mined for a publishable
| result. What they came up with was that by selecting a very
| small subset (~%5) of the neurons they measured they were able
| to tease out a result that certain neurons 'encode addition or
| subtraction'.
|
| Is this real? Maybe. It's in now way explanatory. It doesn't
| offer any sort of model hypothesis or predictions worth
| testing. It's really a waste of time.
| 323 wrote:
| Not that surprising.
|
| For humans, unlike for computers, adding and subtracting are
| different concepts. Think about how most people would transform
| "-3 + 7" into "7 - 3" and only then compute, because it's easier
| to "reverse" the operation than work with negative numbers.
| csee wrote:
| Any way to see what's going on inside one of these neurons while
| it's spiking for a particular calculation problem
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| It would have been strange if brain activity looked exactly the
| same while performing different tasks.
|
| I mean, for once we might actually have some evidence for
| dualism.
| heurisko wrote:
| I wonder if it is also plausible that these neurons are not
| showing as active for calculation purposes, but instead active as
| they are triggering the human emotion to loss aversion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
| 323 wrote:
| Loss aversion has a bit of a reproducibility problem, as stated
| even in your link.
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1013-8
|
| https://osf.io/en9qj/
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